DM for Murder

by Matt Bendoris

  63 #BossyBoots

  Bryce Horrigan @BryceTripleB

  This is a thriller – the cops can’t catch my killer. #KeystoneCops #CluelessCops

  Yet another message was tweeted in the early hours from the murdered presenter’s own account, appearing straight into the Twitter feeds of his ten-million-and-rising followers. It had prompted another panicky call from Colonel Cowan to Sorrell, before the captain had even stepped out of his morning shower. Sorrell listened to his boss’s voicemail on loudspeaker as he got ready.

  ‘Captain, it’s Colonel Cowan here.’ Whenever titles were used, Sorrell knew it was serious. ‘There has been another tweet from Horrigan’s account. I cannot believe that in America – the nation that gave the world Microsoft, Apple, Silicon Valley and Facebook – that we cannot, for the life of us, track one solitary hacker. The whole case hinges on this, yet our killer is tweeting and mocking us with impunity and we seem powerless, absolutely incapable, of doing a damn thing about it. I need – no – I demand answers.’

  ‘And all this is before you’ve even got your shirt on, Bernard?’ Sorrell’s wife, Denise, frowned from the comfort of the marital bed. ‘The sooner you retire the better.’

  Sorrell appreciated his wife’s concern. But he was not ready to jack it all in yet. Not while there was a killer to catch.

  64 #TheList

  ‘Eighty-four more arrests, cap’n. But get this: 1,477 more trolls have come forward, either by contacting local cops or by tweeting us back. We are now below the 5,000 mark – 4,939 to be precise – of those who remain unaccounted for,’ Haye said with delight. ‘The Twitterati have now got involved. They’re bombarding the suspects that haven’t responded to our tweets yet. They’re on their case night and day.’

  ‘Look at our notifications,’ said Fidel, holding up his phone. ‘They’re totting up all the time. That’s another 108 trolls responded in the last hour. It’s working. Who says the net can’t police itself?’

  ‘Send me an email with the most up-to-date figures right away. I’ll take them to the colonel,’ Sorrell said, heading for his door.

  ***

  Colonel Cowan normally looked like he had stepped out of a tailor shop’s window. This morning he looked like he had been sleeping rough. Sorrell hadn’t talked to the colonel since he had left his ranting voicemail on the captain’s cell. It seemed Cowan had already forgotten his early morning outburst.

  ‘Good news?’ the colonel asked, barely looking up from the paperwork on his desk.

  ‘I think so, sir. Out of the 100,000-plus Twitter threats, we have fewer than 5,000 unaccounted for.’

  ‘What? Five thousand? Fuck me, that’s enough to fill a sports arena.’ Sorrell had never heard the colonel swear before. ‘Have you cross-reffed them with the professor’s profile? That should narrow them down.’

  Sorrell truly hated the colonel’s faith in the Professor Benedict Watson’s spurious profiles.

  ‘We’re trying, sir, but we have to identify the trolls first. Police forces right across the states are picking them up daily. The more they arrest, the more press cover it, the more volunteers come forward – it’s faster than waiting for a guy at his door, or arresting him at his work.’

  ‘One of them is our killer, captain. We need to eliminate all but one from that list. Throw everything we’ve got at it.’ The colonel returned to his paperwork, a none-too-subtle sign that their conversation was over.

  Not for the first time, Sorrell would ignore his superior’s order. He had other ideas and it didn’t involve having all his available manpower sitting on Twitter all day.

  65 #BalTaMoore

  Tom O’Neill @DerryDude1887

  Coffee time?

  Connor was about to give April a quick call when he received a DM from Tom O’Neill asking if he fancied a coffee since they were both in town. Connor immediately replied how he’d rather it was a beer, but since they still had work to do they arranged to meet at a city centre Starbucks.

  Tom was no longer the fresh-faced lad Connor remembered from their brief time working together in London. In the intervening decade he had aged badly. He looked old beyond his years, with a grey complexion to match his greying hair.

  ‘Good to see you, Tom,’ Connor said truthfully.

  Tom gave him an equally warm welcome. ‘Bloody hell, Elvis, I didn’t think the next time we met would be in Baltimore,’ Tom replied, with the word ‘Baltimore’ sounding more like ‘Bal-ta-moore’ in his thick Northern Irish accent, which had lost none of its strength over the years.

  ‘Yeah, of all the places Bryce could have ended up dead.’ Connor’s remark rendered them both silent for a moment.

  ‘I know. What a way to go. Someone certainly wanted him gone, that’s for sure.’

  ‘Do you know why he was here?’

  ‘No, not yet. No one does. We’ve got the IT guys at the network going through all his old emails. But Bryce did most of his really private communications by DMs,’ Tom said in hushed conspiratorial tones. ‘Have you met the detective in charge yet? A real hard ass, but a little bit of a plod. Slow on the uptake, I reckon,’ Tom added a little arrogantly – a trait that had probably rubbed off from his former boss.

  Tom was right about Sorrell being a hard ass, but Connor would never have described the police captain as slow, even if he spoke in a lazy drawl. He decided to keep his own counsel about Sorrell.

  ‘You okay if I do this up as a story? “TV bosses baffled by Bryce’s trip to Baltimore”, “Urgent email trawl”, that kind of thing? It’s not great, but it justifies me being here.’ Connor was asking out of politeness as he would have written and filed his copy even without O’Neill’s approval.

  ‘Sure, just keep my name out of it for now though, will you?’ Tom pleaded. ‘I am technically still employed by ABT News and I can’t be seen to be briefing the press.’

  ‘No problem,’ Connor said, meaning it this time. ‘How long are you hanging around?’

  ‘A few days, max. Probably until they release his body. Or what’s left of it. Definitely won’t be an open casket,’ O’Neill said glumly. Again the mention of Bryce’s death left them momentarily silent.

  ‘Have they been able to track who posted the crime scene pictures yet?’ Connor asked.

  ‘Nope. They haven’t even traced all the death threats, either,’ O’Neill revealed, before leaning closer to speak quietly again. There was hardly any need as normal talking voices struggled to be heard above the din of coffee machines and constant chatter from customers. ‘That’s where they’ll find the killer. You got to have seen the shit – literally – that used to get posted through the mail to the office. He had the fire-and-brimstone religious nuts on his case. But it was the pro-life lot who were making subtle enquiries about Bryce’s whereabouts, where he lived, where he liked to eat and drink. They were the really scary ones. Put it this way, it spooked Bryce enough that he actually started changing his habits in the last month. He would take a different route home. Never go to the same restaurant twice. And as you know, Bryce didn’t spook easily.’ Connor made a mental note to include that nugget of information in his copy, too.

  ‘Any names I should check out?’ Connor asked.

  ‘Bloody hell, where do I begin? I’d say there were about half a dozen that we were keeping a close eye on.’ O’Neill checked his iPhone, then jotted down some names on a piece of paper. The last on his list was @GeoffreySchroeder.

  ‘That should keep you busy,’ O’Neill beamed.

  ‘Did you give these to Captain Sorrell?’ Connor asked.

  ‘Nah, we reporters have to keep some info to ourselves, don’t we?’

  Connor thought O’Neill’s response was strange. Every reporter may be hungry for an exclusive, but most wouldn’t withhold crucial information from a murder enquiry.

  ‘Look, Elvis, I shouldn’t be telling you this an
d you have to promise me you won’t print this. Promise?’

  ‘Promise,’ Connor said reassuringly.

  ‘Bryce’s Twitter account was hacked a few weeks before his death. He only found out when one of his DMs had been read when he knew he definitely hadn’t clicked on it.’

  ‘Did he report it?’ Connor asked.

  ‘Only to me. He said somebody was spying on him, I told him to change his password. He was hopeless at Internet security. He’d always use the same password if he could get away with it. His office system made him change it every month and he’d write the new one down on a piece of paper in his top drawer, for Christ’s sake. Figured it was safe because he was the only one with keys to his office, which was true. But Twitter and Facebook don’t keep asking you to change passwords. So he never did until his account had been compromised.’

  ‘Did you set up his new password?’ Connor asked.

  ‘No, he wasn’t that stupid. He loved his Twitter account – he had a string of women on the go, sending him DMs all the time. He wouldn’t trust anyone with that information. I reckon if someone wanted to find out where Bryce was going to be – in order to bump him off – all the clues would be in those DMs.’ O’Neill leaned up straight again to finish the last sip of his skinny caffè mocha.

  ‘Or in order to set him up? But that would have had to come from someone he knew.’ Connor mulled it over, finishing his latte.

  ‘His murderer is in those tweets, Elvis. Just ignore the obvious “I’m going to kill you” ones and concentrate on those who were looking for Bryce’s whereabouts. That’ll lead to your man,’ O’Neill said before settling the bill with a smile. ‘I’ll pay while I still have an expense account.’ They agreed they’d meet later on for a beer.

  But before he went Connor suddenly had a thought. ‘Is his body being repatriated to Scotland?’ he asked, knowing a picture of the coffin leaving for home would make the front page.

  O’Neill gave a wry smile. ‘Yeah, it will be, eventually. I’ll tip you off. For fuck’s sake Elvis, you never switch off, do you?’

  Connor smiled back. ‘Bryce would have done the exact same thing.’

  Now the talking was over, Connor had some serious Twitter trawling to do.

  66 #IHateSatNavs

  April hated with a passion the satellite navigation system her daughter Jayne had bought for her one Christmas. Despite being repeatedly shown how to operate it, every time she stared at its blank screen it perfectly mirrored her mind. Then she’d remember to press its one and only button to switch it on, before she was met with a series of icons that befuddled her all the more. When she finally found the ‘Navigate to?’ option, her stubby little fingers took an age to enter the postcode, as she would be pressing several letters at the same time.

  But worse of all was the American accent that would ‘order’ her around. On more than one occasion she had remarked to Connor, ‘And just how would an American know his way around Glasgow?’ April had said it so often, Connor was no longer convinced she was joking.

  Despite its US twang, the sat-nav did successfully direct April and her battered old purple Daewoo car to the address in Glasgow’s Otago Street she was looking for.

  She had called her newsdesk first thing asking if they wanted her to hit the doorstep of Bryce Horrigan’s one-time student tormentor.

  ‘Great idea,’ her grateful news editor Big Fergie had practically shouted, as he was staring at a yet another nearly empty schedule. ‘I should have thought of that. I’m surprised no one else has tracked him down already.’

  ‘Connor said Gilmour wasn’t on the voters’ roll and he hasn’t been on social media since the court ordered him off it,’ April explained.

  ‘Brilliant,’ Big Fergie exclaimed, getting even more excited at the prospect of potential splash material. ‘Although, how did Connor get his address?’ he asked, suddenly getting suspicious. Ever since the Leveson Inquiry, newspapers now had to play everything by the book. There were to be no ‘dark arts’ in obtaining ex-directory phone numbers or blagging for information, such as when a reporter or associate called a number under false pretences.

  ‘Bryce gave it to him. He got it from the Met, when the police interviewed him in London. Apparently, a helpful cop had left Gilmour’s address clearly visible on his notepad. Bryce thought it would be too self-indulgent to send his own reporters to doorstep him. So he gave Connor a call instead.’

  ‘Excellent,’ the relieved news editor said, ‘let’s hit it.’

  67 #AskONeill

  Baby Angel @BabyAngel

  I see you haven’t arrested The Killer yet?

  The captain sighed when he saw the direct message from Baby Angel. He now found their correspondence tedious.

  Bernard Sorrell @BernardSorrell

  Well done, you’ve read the news.

  Baby Angel @BabyAngel

  I don’t need to read the news to know what’s going on, captain. You of all people should know that.

  Bernard Sorrell @BernardSorrell

  Do you have some information or are you shooting the breeze? Cos I’m kinda busy, what with this homicide investigation.

  Baby Angel @BabyAngel

  You’ve met Bryce’s deputy, Tom O’Neill. What did you make of him?

  The captain was taken aback again. He hated anyone, including Colonel Cowan, knowing his business. He imparted case information begrudgingly even to members of his own team.

  Bernard Sorrell @BernardSorrell

  He was all right.

  Baby Angel @BabyAngel

  Feel he was telling you the truth?

  Bernard Sorrell @BernardSorrell

  Not the whole truth, but the version his bosses wanted to share.

  Baby Angel @BabyAngel

  Gave you a list of names, no doubt?

  Bernard Sorrell @BernardSorrell

  Yes.

  Baby Angel @BabyAngel

  Ask him about other list of names. The one with Geoffrey Schroeder on it that he gave to that reporter, Presley. See what he says.

  Sorrell truly hated being played in this way. But for now he had little choice but to take part in a game where all the rules were being set by the mysterious Baby Angel.

  68 #Everest

  There was an intercom entry system to the crumbling old yellow sandstone building, but no need to use it, as the main door was permanently unlocked. April arduously climbed the three flights of steps to the top flat. She wondered if Edmund Hillary also broke out in a succession of hot hormonal flushes trying to make it to the summit. On each landing of the dingy stairwell, she was greeted by a different variety of odours that attested to the cosmopolitan tastes of the occupants, from the curry spices of India or Pakistan to Chinese culinary treats. It made April hungry.

  She loved the way she had seen so many different nationalities settle in Glasgow over the generations. Unlike some of England’s cities, by and large Glasgow had never been blighted by racial tensions. It was something that made her immensely proud of her little country, that it had such a big outlook on the world.

  As she plodded her way up the final flight of steps with her thick thighs and lungs on fire, she was suddenly glad she had never lived in student digs. April had always been house-proud – from her days when she was a young mum living in a cramped council flat, to now, when three divorces had left her with a considerable property portfolio. Along with the lovingly restored old Victorian house on Glasgow’s Southside, she had half a dozen flats dotted around the city, which she rented out to students and young families. She had bought them cheaply and in areas normally untouched by developers, and struck it lucky when the districts were targeted by city rejuvenation schemes, or in one case, the creation of a so-called media village, when the BBC and rival STV television stations moved in next door to each other.

  But April wouldn’t have bought t
his flat. She hated old tenement buildings as they were too reminiscent of her childhood.

  She knocked on the door, which she guessed had been painted white at some point, but had turned almost yellow with the passage of time. The frame had been bust and repaired several times by the looks of things, from either break-ins or flatmates who had lost their keys and used the age-old master key of a boot to the door. She pressed the doorbell and wondered why she had bothered, as it emitted no sound. April decided to give another sturdy knock instead. Music could be heard from deep within the recesses of the apartment so she knew someone was home.

  Moments later the door was opened by a girl in a short skimpy dress, which showed off her array of body tattoos. April’s eyes couldn’t help dropping to those on the girl’s thighs. In the dim light of the landing, the body art looked like varicose veins.

  ‘Hi,’ April said as cheerily as she could muster, ‘is Des around, love?’

  April could not get her head around the modern phenomenon of tattoos. Her least favourite were the multi-coloured ‘sleeves’, with the ‘ink art’ covering the length and breadth of people’s arms. In her day, tattoos were exclusively for sailors and convicts. And it baffled her why everyone wanted to look the same.

  It was the turn of the girl to look April up and down, before she shouted over her shoulder, ‘Dessy – someone to see you.’

  ‘What?’ came the distant reply.

  ‘At the door. Someone wants to see you.’ The girl gave a half smile as she told April, ‘He’s just coming. We’re not normally up this early.’

  The statement caused April to glance involuntarily at her watch. It had just gone 10.30am. Tattoo girl made way for Des Gilmour, who had a fine mop of unruly bed hair, and was wearing black skinny jeans and a student standard-issue faded T-shirt, with the name of some band April had never heard of, or wanted to.

  ‘Can I help you?’ he said in a passive-aggressive way, his chin jutted forward and his hands on his narrow hips.